An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
